Women in Art, Month I

Paintings by Anne Grgich, Alison O'Donoghue, Cheri O'Brien
and New Jewelry by Sharon Saindon

Opening Reception
Saturday, April 5th, 6 to 8PM

Born and raised in Portland, OR Alison O’Donoghue has been painting and exhibiting her work for over 20 years. Described by Anne Grgich her paintings are “obsessive mazelike arrangements . . . . intestinal realities and accessible entanglements with positive and negative spaces. O’Donoghue starts with a smooth black layer of paint and detailed brushlike drawings in white. O’Donoghue’s then adds a vibrating color palate that moves her tales endlessly to their own rhythm of reality and with volume, dimension, light and shade in fluid emotion seeming to be endlessly streaming out of her fingertips building an unreality moving in space for the viewer to see where imagination leads to make their own conclusions."

Artisans on Taylor welcomes back Anne Grgich. The curator of one of AOT’s most well-received exhibitions, Internal Guidance Systems: Visionary Art Tour, returns with a large body of her own work.

Speaking on her work Grgich says, “So much is involved in my work and where it comes from, all at once: bold and luminous, painterly, gritty, grotesque, hysterical, historic, collage onslaughts treated to various ends for color (as a palette), as form, as reference, reverence and design—all overlain with the calligraphy of my own religious vernacular—a feverish automatic painting vocabulary with infinite, mutating dialects.”

From Professor of Art History and Theory and Director of the School of Art & Design Colin Rhodes we learn, “Grgich began making spontaneous art at the age of fifteen, mostly by clandestinely painting in her family’s books, or making junk constructions. She first introduced collage into her work around 1988, but took it to a higher level in 1997 during a period of illness. During her convalescence she worked in bed, making paintings on file cards and CD’s and organizing collages from material she had collected. When she had recovered, later that year she began to produce collage paintings—images of people encountered over time in the street and in mind journeys that manifest themselves and recombine, according to her mood, in the process of creation. Recently, she has described her faces and people as ‘manifestations of conglomerated persona, in a way acting out these characters’. In a way they are a displacement for action in the world out there; fragments of experience, thought and interaction brought together to produce new possibilities out of contemplation. As she puts it, ‘bundling images, separating them’, then looking for ‘interrelating pieces to build meaning and feeling’. Seen separately these faces are individually commanding, but seen together, they form not so much a series of portraits as a group of living presences.”

Cheri O’Brien is a Pacific Northwest native currently residing and painting in Everett. She is a self-taught professional artist of nineteen years continually inspired by her many muses, both real and imagined. The fabulous river and mountain views from her studio window as well as the Palouse region are romantically captured. Considered an 'artist's artist' by her peers, she also creates humorous paintings of people and animals in interesting situations. Her latest work has been glass enamel paintings and fused painted stained glass.

In the words of Joe Heim of the Seattle Times, "Each painting is a contained one-act play. O’Brien’s figures convey real emotion. Pernicious humor, loneliness and boredom are revealed in bold vividly colored paintings."

O’Brien’s work is collected throughout Washington State and as the world sits up and takes notice of this eclectic artist with a unique voice, her paintings are making their way across the whole Continent and eking into Europe and Japan.

Port Townsend metalsmith, Sharon Saindon, presents a new body of jewelry designs. You most likely find her in her 10 x 10 foot shop in the late afternoon. Savoring the twilight Saindon is often at her most creative in the evenings.

As a student her focus was on sculpture, but her turned to jewelry as she became interested in the psychology of body adornment. “By wearing jewelry people emake art and soulful expression part of their everyday lives.”

Saindon is known for a straight-forward elegance which honors the inherent beauty and strength of metal. This distinctive style is born of a simple design process, “Doodle in a book, scratch out the ugly ones, doodle again, make one out of copper. If it’s ugly, toss it in the recycle bin, if it’s only kind of ugly let it sit on the desk and hope that I can figure out how to make it prettier.”[PICTURED, from top: Crash Course by Alison O’Donohgue, Bus to Guadalajara by Cheri O’Brien, Earrings by Sharon Saindon]